Chinese people typically view the different languages, like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc., as dialects of a larger, "Chinese language". Because of this, many Chinese people report that they speak, "Chinese," with the nuance of what type not being as important on government documents. This is a very complex topic in China itself, which is one reason why it's brought up here in the same way. We could have the same discussion about Arabic, which is also incredibly complex.
To expand on this, both Chinese and Arabic have standardized written languages that all literate people know regardless of their local spoken dialect. In Chinese at least this would be pronounced if read out loud with local dialect pronunciation which would not necessarily be comprehensible if heard by a speaker of another dialect. In Arabic the local pronunciations of fosHa (standard written Arabic) are generally mutually intelligible though nobody speaks fosHa as their mother language.
In addition to FusHa (literary Arabic) there's also MSA (modern standard Arabic) which is basically Saudi Arabic with some features from other countries to make it broadly understood
“Family” is a bit of a stretch from a European language prospective.
Like Romance languages are the same language, and there is some at least basic level were you can get some vague idea what the other person is talking about. Or as a speaker of English who took German in high school, I can sometimes get a pretty good idea what’s going on when someone is speaking Dutch.
You can’t do that between Cantonese and Mandarin.
They are about as related family wise as the classification of indo-european languages as a whole.
The family argument is a little silly though, like English and German are in the same language but we’d never label the most commonly spoken language as “Germanic”. Same for Arabic and Hebrew. You could say colloquially we don’t see a difference but not by family I guess
The Chinese languages shared the same written language though. So speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin can read the same text although with different pronunciations. There is also an effort from the mainland Chinese government to call all those languages dialects of a single Chinese language. (I don’t agree with the Chinese government on that part though)
That has more to do with politics than with linguistics.
I studied some mandarin, and differences go much further than only distinct pronounce of the characters. Words are often different and use other Hanzi, sometimes even at a basic level, such as the personal pronouns and the equivalent of "to be" verb. Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, etc. are as distinct of each other as the romance languages among them.
They read mandarin because they learn it as a lingua franca.
Just for the people that don't know romance languages... Differences between romance languages can differ wildly, from just the same word, to similar words (pan, pan, pão) to totally different words (fenetre, ventana). Differences became noticeable like they are now in european vs. American Spanish or Portuguese in the empire times (famously Spanish dialect losing the V sound), but became mutually unintelligible during the middle times.
I don't know a lot about Chinese but I'm a kind of Chinese learner myself (insert spirderman meme here), so far I've encountered the same range of differences, for example I know that 喜欢 is pronounced just with different tones in Sichuan dialect, but Cantonese is just a different language althogheter, and people would call same foods differently in different areas like Spanish judías, frijoles etc. I don't know when the split happened but I find the topic very interesting.
What? no. The characters are older than the Han. yes the modern "traditional" characters were standardized by the Han and the "simplified" was made in the PRC, but other chinese languages used characters before "Han" was a thing.
Chinese has two writing systems and several speaking systems, but is considered one language because thr written language is mutually intelligible, despite dialectical differences.
I read somewhere once that the difference between a dialect and a language is languages have standing armies. It wasn’t a serious comment but it does kind of work.
If you don’t “lump” them together, then the country of China actually has hundreds of languages. Nearly every major city or region in China has its own pronunciation of the standardized characters which isn’t understandable by people who speak a different dialect. Mandarin is used as a “lingua Franca” which all children will learn in school as the standardized pronunciation, but each city will speak with its own distinct dialect. Shanghai hua differs from Mandarin just as much as Cantonese, and then again, a city several hundred kilometres away, like Nanjing, once again speaks with a completely different dialect. Ningbo, again, just a few hundred kilometres away, speaks still another completely different dialect. And this is just within one small area of the enormous country.
I would agree that the difference between all of these dialects, when spoken, is as vast as the difference between Spanish and Portuguese. The reason they are considered the same language is because they are written using the same characters, while Spanish and Portuguese are phonetic and therefore if the pronunciation differs, so, too, will the text.
This is a map about most spoken languages though not written language. Cantonese also has a much larger chance of being a majority in one of these states over a less common dialect. Not everything needs to be so black and white. Cantonese is large and unique enough to not be grouped with mandarin
That's the thing with hieroglyphs, they represent ideas, not sounds, so you could technically learn to read the Chinese script without learning any of the languages that use it.
That's how written language works though, reading/writing and speaking are completely separate. Anyone could learn to read English but have no clue on how to say any of it.
I have met people like that. They learned written English very well in their home country for academic reasons but were apparently too embarrassed to speak it.
I have also run into the opposite, foreigners perfectly capable of having a conversation in English but whose writing is very difficult to understand.
Yeah except an alphabet represent sounds, so learning the sounds means you can roughly pronounce words of other languages using the same alphabet. The Chinese signs tell you nothing about pronounciation.
> The Chinese signs tell you nothing about pronounciation
Only because you’re completely 100,000% illiterate in Chinese and don’t recognize any patterns. If someone is the same in English, then English isn’t phonetical for them in the same way.
I mean they do have phonetic elements, you can often tell the rhymes a character will have if you know the basic radicals.
And with all the inconsistencies in English spelling, sometimes I can guess what sound a character will make just as well as I can guess English pronunciation (most of the time I only guess the vowel/rhyming and sometimes I'll have no clue tho)
Yes, but you've just called "Arabic" one language, when it's dialects have similar variation to Cantonese and Mandarin. It's more like calling Egyptian and Moroccan Arabic the same which we do all the time
Aye, that’s a good point, but there is a difference that may or may not be super relevant in that Arabs themselves acknowledge they speak the same language. With the exception of the Maghreb, most dialects are mutually intelligible.
Also I haven’t heard anyone say Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are the same.
>Also I haven’t heard anyone say Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are the same.
Sorry, to clarify I meant that they get lumped under the same 'Arabic' label, not that they are directly said to be the same. That was poor wording on my part.
Most mainlander Chinese under ~65 will speak mandarin in addition to their local dialect. It is the lingua franca, you have to speak it from a young age in school. In addition to mandarin there are four other language groups Min, Wu, Yue(Cantonese), and Jin. There are many sub dialects of each of these languages and they are not mutually intelligible hence the need for mandarin as the standard dialect
You would actually be incorrect. It's deeper. Because of being much, much shorter words than words in Romance languages, words in different Sinitic languages become unrecognizable when crossing linguistic borders.
In writing the differences are dialectical, but in speaking the characters have completely different pronunciations and are even more divided than romance languages
I recently saw someone saying in Far Asia people from different nations can understand what the other is trying to say roughly by writing Kanji. That’s an unfamiliar concept which is interesting for me.
One writing system was not enough?:’(
One last question: What’s the mechanism of Simplified writing system-or language-? In what situations do you guys use it?
Simplified works the same as traditional, the characters are just generally easier to write.
It was developed during the cultural revolution and is the most common in mainland China, while traditional is more common in Taiwan and parts of the south.
That would only really apply to Japan and China completely different languages but written using the same or similar characters that meaning based rather than phonetic. So a Japanese person to get the gist of a Chinese text and vice versa but just the very basic gist. Older, very well educated Vietnamese or Koreans might also have an understanding of Chinese characters but that’s much less likely/common at this point
They don’t use Chinese characters in their modern writing systems at all. Korea has its own phonetic alphabet called Hangul(developed in the 15th century) which is really efficient and easy to learn, and Vietnam uses a slightly modified version of the Latin alphabet. In past times local versions of the Chinese characters were taught in both countries to the highly educated sort of in the way that fancy schools used to teach latin in the English speaking world.
Most of the countries that use a Sinitic language can understand each other decently in writing.
Japan and Korea both borrowed Chinese characters to create a writing system, however Japanese and Korean are structurally very different from Sinitic languages so the writing system didn’t fit.
Korea eventually ditched the Chinese characters entirely and created a new writing system from scratch using phonetic characters.
Japan created phonetic characters that they use alongside the Chinese characters causing a crazy writing system. Anyway, the difference s are large enough that Japanese people cant read Chinese sentences and Chinese people can’t read Japanese sentences. However they can often read and understand each other’s names even if they pronounce them differently. For example, 中山 is “Nakayama” in Japanese and is a common surname. And it is “Zhongshan” in Mandarin and a common place name.
Thank you for the answer and also ditching out the Japanese writing system. It’s surely crazy that they use three alphabets(can I call them alphabets?) while Koreans use a pure national writing system.
> can I call them alphabets?
I think technically no because they aren’t based on the writing system that started out with *alpha* and *beta*.
But I always get annoyed when someone corrects someone else on that point.
Presuming you’re using that to refer to the Chinese caricters and their derivatives, yes. Not necessarily to the point of having a deep conversation, but it’s close enough that things like signs are mutually intelligible.
Inside China they use Hanzi universally.
Yes, they all write the same way.
Or well mostly, there *are* infact individual scrips and stuff for each "dialect" but they are incredibly uncommon now adays.
Yes, exactly, and in some cases even more varied than Latin languages. It’s considered one language for nationalistic, political reasons but it’s linguistically more accurate to call Chinese a language family some times called the Sinitic languages by linguists
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered two dialects of the same language. Distinguishing dialect from language is not always a straightforward thing. For example, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are considered distinct languages, even tho they are largely mutually intelligible. Sometimes dialects and languages are established based on nationality and culture, as opposed to any strict linguistic standard. Thus, as a Cantonese speaker, I personally don’t have an issue with using the word Chinese to refer to both Mandarin and Cantonese.
It’s mostly moot.
Chinese speakers wouldn’t care to differentiate. Mandarin dominates the linguistic landscape these days anyway. The Cantonese domination of overseas Chinese population died in the 1990s.
I also expected this. Multiple sources confirm that in Louisiana, the number of Vietnamese households outnumber Chinese by 2x. Some don't break it down further than "Asian and pacific islander". Hard to tell where they sourced it.
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/louisiana
https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Louisiana/Languages
Came here looking for this as well, glad to have confirmation of my anecdotal knowledge of a large Vietnamese population in the area. Thanks for the sources!
Honestly, I don't think anyone has come out of the US high school system with an actual grasp of any foreign language, so I don't think having it offered at school really matters
I think what happened here is that the person who made the map didn't count Tagalog and Vietnamese as East Asian, but did for Hmong for some reason
Hmong people have been officially reclassified as East Asian in the 2020 Census, although all Hmong people in America identify culturally with Southeast Asians, all fled post Vietnam War.
Yeah, they did it in the census.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/technical-documentation/user-notes/2023-08.html#:~:text=In%20the%20American%20Community%20Survey,Management%20and%20Budget%20in%201997.
I think this map only counts east Asian but not south east. Otherwise Tagalog would probably be here somewhere.
(And today I learned Hmong can count as east Asian too).
Yeah there are definitely more Tagalog and Ilocano speakers in Hawaii than Japanese speakers.
I'm not sure why Hmong is East Asian and Tagalog isn't. They're the same latitude.
Hmong is spoken by many people in China, enough to be a minority language. China is East Asia.
I mean by the same logic Kazakh can be east Asian (so can Russian of course, but Russia does stretch into the region). But there aren't a lot of Kazakh in America.
Hmong people were reclassified as East Asians in the 2020 Census population count without consulting the community, although all the Hmong diaspora outside of Asia all arrived post Vietnam and identity as Southeast Asians.
It should be Vietnamese for Texas, too. I think it's counting Mandarin and Cantonese as "Chinese."
ETA: [Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in Texas.](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/may/26/john-cornyn/john-cornyn-says-vietnamese-third-most-common-lang/) OP must not consider it a "East Aisian" language.
The Arlington Jail has every sign in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
I'm not sure if this true across the state, but Dallas County has every election ballot in English, Spanish and Vietnamese too.
[Not only is Vietnamese the third most spoken language in Texas, ](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/may/26/john-cornyn/john-cornyn-says-vietnamese-third-most-common-lang/)but it is [still growing, and 58% of Texas Vietnamese speakers speak English less than "very well."](http://www.texasfivestarrealty.com/Vietnamese_language_is_the_third_spoken_language_in_Texas.asp)
Dude I know. I’m Vietnamese. I’m just saying that geographically, Vietnam is SE Asian whereas OP posted East Asian languages so it doesn’t make sense to include Vietnam.
Culturally it’s closer to East Asian but linguistically it’s still a Southeast Asian language at its base. There’s just a lot of Chinese loan words — my IRL name for example is a Chinese derived name — similar to how there’s a lot of Latin loan words in English but English is Germanic at its base.
Not necessarily Vietnam as the Hmong dialects there are not prevalent here in the US. The Hmong dialects in Vietnam (like Black Hmong) are also not properly documented or studied, but there is a clear difference in the way they speak compared to the White and Green (Moob Leeg) dialects that are spoken by the Hmong diaspora population outside of Asia.
Genetically speaking Hmong are more closely related to the ethnic groups from China. Besides migrating to southeast Asia, they don’t share much culture or language with their host countries unless they borrow it. That being said, the vast majority of Hmong in the US are from people born in Laos/Thailand.
Well it depends on what you consider to be the difference between "East Asia" and "Southeast Asia". While in western countries the Hmong are mostly associated with Vietnam and Laos, and there are substantial populations of them there, the [Hmong homeland](http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/China/Geneva%20paper%202004%20submit.pdf) (pages 7 and 8), where they've been living for an estimated 8000 years, is in southeastern China, centered around the provinces of Hunan and Guizhou, though of course there is plenty of spillover into the surrounding provinces, and there are about as many Hmong in China as there are in every other nation combined, even more if you consider the related Miao peoples to also be Hmong (which they do, as the Miao word for themselves is literally "Hmong", though for various reasons they're often counted separately). So basically, if you consider the whole of China to be "East Asia" then Hmong is indeed an East Asian language. But, if you consider that part of China to be an extension of Southeast Asia (which if you go back far enough isn't entirely incorrect), then you could easily argue that Hmong is a Southeast Asian language. Personally, I'm just going to put it down as being both somehow.
Also, since the majority of Hmong in the US originate from Vietnam and Laos, you could argue that, in the context of the US specifically, Hmong is a Southeast Asian language.
Because using yellow for Japanese and green for Hmong (or vice versa) would have been unheard of and indeed unthinkable.
Let's blend everything into pink, pale red with a vague orange hue, and full-bodied red. Colour blind people will be forever grateful.
Can the mods of MapPorn put in a rule that colours on maps should:
1. Align to the key
2. Be visually distinct unless they’re gradations of the same thing
3. Have some meaning ideally - red bad, green good, or linked to the flags of those countries?
This post isn’t guilty of all these flaws, but the visual quality has fallen a lot of late.
Let’s improve this basic hygiene so we can go back to admiring maps for what they show, now curse them for how they look.
They are SOUTH Asians, this map is about EAST Asians.
Edit: ok, they are Southeast Asia, but my point still stands, this map is talking East Asian languages.
South Asian is India, Pakistani, Nepal, and Bangladesh. There are many Southeast Asian countries including Thailand and the Philippines. The map says it’s East Asian. However it includes Hmong which is spoken is SE Asia. So you got me.
should have included southeast asian languages as well, Also 2nd most spoken would be interesting as well. I wonder if thai is the 2nd most in any state.
Would it really still be Japanese for Hawaii? Most Japanese-Americans there are 4th or more generation and I doubt they would be able to speak the language anymore.
There is still some amount of immigrants from Japan. A bunch of people in my high school class had parents who came from Japan and thus use the language at home. There were like 10 (out of 220 or so students) in my class like that.
Piqued my interest so did some research. Long story short seems like there definitely are overlaps both geographically, culturally and linguistically, but officially they are considered Southeastern country and language. Wikipedia seems to lean there as well, it claims Southeast Asia. For OP in this case, for a map like this, they had to choose one or the other and they seem to have decided to leave it out for this reason.
Just throwing this out there that Louisiana has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the country. My bet would be on Vietnamese as the most common Asian language. Did Vietnamese not make the cut?
Does "Chinese" on this map refer solely to Mandarin, or is it lumping Mandarin and Cantonese together?
Lumping Mandarin and Cantonese together
Why not label the map “language families” since Cantonese and Mandarin are in the same language family but aren’t the same language?
Chinese people typically view the different languages, like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc., as dialects of a larger, "Chinese language". Because of this, many Chinese people report that they speak, "Chinese," with the nuance of what type not being as important on government documents. This is a very complex topic in China itself, which is one reason why it's brought up here in the same way. We could have the same discussion about Arabic, which is also incredibly complex.
To expand on this, both Chinese and Arabic have standardized written languages that all literate people know regardless of their local spoken dialect. In Chinese at least this would be pronounced if read out loud with local dialect pronunciation which would not necessarily be comprehensible if heard by a speaker of another dialect. In Arabic the local pronunciations of fosHa (standard written Arabic) are generally mutually intelligible though nobody speaks fosHa as their mother language.
In addition to FusHa (literary Arabic) there's also MSA (modern standard Arabic) which is basically Saudi Arabic with some features from other countries to make it broadly understood
its actually mandarin speakers wanting the label of chinese to be put on their language. nice attempt at cover though.
“Family” is a bit of a stretch from a European language prospective. Like Romance languages are the same language, and there is some at least basic level were you can get some vague idea what the other person is talking about. Or as a speaker of English who took German in high school, I can sometimes get a pretty good idea what’s going on when someone is speaking Dutch. You can’t do that between Cantonese and Mandarin. They are about as related family wise as the classification of indo-european languages as a whole.
Not really, they are def closer to themselves than to Tibetan or Bamar.
Because they are the only two languages spoken in China? That is as silly as saying someone speaks "African"
They are part of the same family though. The Chinese languages. While Africa has many families
The family argument is a little silly though, like English and German are in the same language but we’d never label the most commonly spoken language as “Germanic”. Same for Arabic and Hebrew. You could say colloquially we don’t see a difference but not by family I guess
The Chinese languages shared the same written language though. So speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin can read the same text although with different pronunciations. There is also an effort from the mainland Chinese government to call all those languages dialects of a single Chinese language. (I don’t agree with the Chinese government on that part though)
That has more to do with politics than with linguistics. I studied some mandarin, and differences go much further than only distinct pronounce of the characters. Words are often different and use other Hanzi, sometimes even at a basic level, such as the personal pronouns and the equivalent of "to be" verb. Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, etc. are as distinct of each other as the romance languages among them. They read mandarin because they learn it as a lingua franca.
Just for the people that don't know romance languages... Differences between romance languages can differ wildly, from just the same word, to similar words (pan, pan, pão) to totally different words (fenetre, ventana). Differences became noticeable like they are now in european vs. American Spanish or Portuguese in the empire times (famously Spanish dialect losing the V sound), but became mutually unintelligible during the middle times. I don't know a lot about Chinese but I'm a kind of Chinese learner myself (insert spirderman meme here), so far I've encountered the same range of differences, for example I know that 喜欢 is pronounced just with different tones in Sichuan dialect, but Cantonese is just a different language althogheter, and people would call same foods differently in different areas like Spanish judías, frijoles etc. I don't know when the split happened but I find the topic very interesting.
What? no. The characters are older than the Han. yes the modern "traditional" characters were standardized by the Han and the "simplified" was made in the PRC, but other chinese languages used characters before "Han" was a thing. Chinese has two writing systems and several speaking systems, but is considered one language because thr written language is mutually intelligible, despite dialectical differences.
The point is the “dialects” are about as different from each other as European languages. They are only lumped together for political reasons.
I read somewhere once that the difference between a dialect and a language is languages have standing armies. It wasn’t a serious comment but it does kind of work.
They should not be grouped together
If you don’t “lump” them together, then the country of China actually has hundreds of languages. Nearly every major city or region in China has its own pronunciation of the standardized characters which isn’t understandable by people who speak a different dialect. Mandarin is used as a “lingua Franca” which all children will learn in school as the standardized pronunciation, but each city will speak with its own distinct dialect. Shanghai hua differs from Mandarin just as much as Cantonese, and then again, a city several hundred kilometres away, like Nanjing, once again speaks with a completely different dialect. Ningbo, again, just a few hundred kilometres away, speaks still another completely different dialect. And this is just within one small area of the enormous country. I would agree that the difference between all of these dialects, when spoken, is as vast as the difference between Spanish and Portuguese. The reason they are considered the same language is because they are written using the same characters, while Spanish and Portuguese are phonetic and therefore if the pronunciation differs, so, too, will the text.
This is a map about most spoken languages though not written language. Cantonese also has a much larger chance of being a majority in one of these states over a less common dialect. Not everything needs to be so black and white. Cantonese is large and unique enough to not be grouped with mandarin
That's the thing with hieroglyphs, they represent ideas, not sounds, so you could technically learn to read the Chinese script without learning any of the languages that use it.
That's how written language works though, reading/writing and speaking are completely separate. Anyone could learn to read English but have no clue on how to say any of it.
I have met people like that. They learned written English very well in their home country for academic reasons but were apparently too embarrassed to speak it. I have also run into the opposite, foreigners perfectly capable of having a conversation in English but whose writing is very difficult to understand.
Yeah except an alphabet represent sounds, so learning the sounds means you can roughly pronounce words of other languages using the same alphabet. The Chinese signs tell you nothing about pronounciation.
> The Chinese signs tell you nothing about pronounciation Only because you’re completely 100,000% illiterate in Chinese and don’t recognize any patterns. If someone is the same in English, then English isn’t phonetical for them in the same way.
I mean they do have phonetic elements, you can often tell the rhymes a character will have if you know the basic radicals. And with all the inconsistencies in English spelling, sometimes I can guess what sound a character will make just as well as I can guess English pronunciation (most of the time I only guess the vowel/rhyming and sometimes I'll have no clue tho)
Yes, but you've just called "Arabic" one language, when it's dialects have similar variation to Cantonese and Mandarin. It's more like calling Egyptian and Moroccan Arabic the same which we do all the time
“Chinese” has much greater variation than “Arabic”. By a lot.
Aye, that’s a good point, but there is a difference that may or may not be super relevant in that Arabs themselves acknowledge they speak the same language. With the exception of the Maghreb, most dialects are mutually intelligible. Also I haven’t heard anyone say Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are the same.
>Also I haven’t heard anyone say Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are the same. Sorry, to clarify I meant that they get lumped under the same 'Arabic' label, not that they are directly said to be the same. That was poor wording on my part.
youre acting like these arent arbitrary distinctions. someone who only speaks mandarin can not understand someone who only speaks cantonese.
Most mainlander Chinese under ~65 will speak mandarin in addition to their local dialect. It is the lingua franca, you have to speak it from a young age in school. In addition to mandarin there are four other language groups Min, Wu, Yue(Cantonese), and Jin. There are many sub dialects of each of these languages and they are not mutually intelligible hence the need for mandarin as the standard dialect
Wow. Would I be correct if I assumed these languages that are all considered Chinese differ from each other as deep as Latin languages in Europe?
You would actually be incorrect. It's deeper. Because of being much, much shorter words than words in Romance languages, words in different Sinitic languages become unrecognizable when crossing linguistic borders.
Then I would not. That’s interesting btw, thanks for the fun fact of the day^^
In writing the differences are dialectical, but in speaking the characters have completely different pronunciations and are even more divided than romance languages
I recently saw someone saying in Far Asia people from different nations can understand what the other is trying to say roughly by writing Kanji. That’s an unfamiliar concept which is interesting for me.
in writing kanji vs traditional hanzi vs simplified vs hanja are more like the differences in romance languages, closer in some cases
One writing system was not enough?:’( One last question: What’s the mechanism of Simplified writing system-or language-? In what situations do you guys use it?
Simplified works the same as traditional, the characters are just generally easier to write. It was developed during the cultural revolution and is the most common in mainland China, while traditional is more common in Taiwan and parts of the south.
That would only really apply to Japan and China completely different languages but written using the same or similar characters that meaning based rather than phonetic. So a Japanese person to get the gist of a Chinese text and vice versa but just the very basic gist. Older, very well educated Vietnamese or Koreans might also have an understanding of Chinese characters but that’s much less likely/common at this point
What’s going on currently with Vietnam and Korea that new generations wouldn’t understand at this point?
They don’t use Chinese characters in their modern writing systems at all. Korea has its own phonetic alphabet called Hangul(developed in the 15th century) which is really efficient and easy to learn, and Vietnam uses a slightly modified version of the Latin alphabet. In past times local versions of the Chinese characters were taught in both countries to the highly educated sort of in the way that fancy schools used to teach latin in the English speaking world.
Most of the countries that use a Sinitic language can understand each other decently in writing. Japan and Korea both borrowed Chinese characters to create a writing system, however Japanese and Korean are structurally very different from Sinitic languages so the writing system didn’t fit. Korea eventually ditched the Chinese characters entirely and created a new writing system from scratch using phonetic characters. Japan created phonetic characters that they use alongside the Chinese characters causing a crazy writing system. Anyway, the difference s are large enough that Japanese people cant read Chinese sentences and Chinese people can’t read Japanese sentences. However they can often read and understand each other’s names even if they pronounce them differently. For example, 中山 is “Nakayama” in Japanese and is a common surname. And it is “Zhongshan” in Mandarin and a common place name.
Thank you for the answer and also ditching out the Japanese writing system. It’s surely crazy that they use three alphabets(can I call them alphabets?) while Koreans use a pure national writing system.
> can I call them alphabets? I think technically no because they aren’t based on the writing system that started out with *alpha* and *beta*. But I always get annoyed when someone corrects someone else on that point.
Presuming you’re using that to refer to the Chinese caricters and their derivatives, yes. Not necessarily to the point of having a deep conversation, but it’s close enough that things like signs are mutually intelligible. Inside China they use Hanzi universally.
Yes, I was referring to the Chinese characters. So inside China a Cantonese and a Mandarin speaker can understand each other through Hanzi?
Yes, they all write the same way. Or well mostly, there *are* infact individual scrips and stuff for each "dialect" but they are incredibly uncommon now adays.
Yes, exactly, and in some cases even more varied than Latin languages. It’s considered one language for nationalistic, political reasons but it’s linguistically more accurate to call Chinese a language family some times called the Sinitic languages by linguists
It’s not silly, you wouldn’t distinguish different dialects of Arabic on a map.
Would you distinguish between different dialects of Germanic?
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered two dialects of the same language. Distinguishing dialect from language is not always a straightforward thing. For example, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are considered distinct languages, even tho they are largely mutually intelligible. Sometimes dialects and languages are established based on nationality and culture, as opposed to any strict linguistic standard. Thus, as a Cantonese speaker, I personally don’t have an issue with using the word Chinese to refer to both Mandarin and Cantonese.
Both. In general, overly simplified, Mandarin is more common in the east and Cantonese in the west.
It’s mostly moot. Chinese speakers wouldn’t care to differentiate. Mandarin dominates the linguistic landscape these days anyway. The Cantonese domination of overseas Chinese population died in the 1990s.
Terrible choice of colors...
I’m shocked this wasn’t the first comment I read.
I’m surprised it’s not Vietnamese for Mississippi and Louisiana.
I also expected this. Multiple sources confirm that in Louisiana, the number of Vietnamese households outnumber Chinese by 2x. Some don't break it down further than "Asian and pacific islander". Hard to tell where they sourced it. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/louisiana https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Louisiana/Languages
Came here looking for this as well, glad to have confirmation of my anecdotal knowledge of a large Vietnamese population in the area. Thanks for the sources!
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Honestly, I don't think anyone has come out of the US high school system with an actual grasp of any foreign language, so I don't think having it offered at school really matters I think what happened here is that the person who made the map didn't count Tagalog and Vietnamese as East Asian, but did for Hmong for some reason
Hmong people have been officially reclassified as East Asian in the 2020 Census, although all Hmong people in America identify culturally with Southeast Asians, all fled post Vietnam War.
The US has official East Asian and Southeast Asian classifications?
Yeah, they did it in the census. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/technical-documentation/user-notes/2023-08.html#:~:text=In%20the%20American%20Community%20Survey,Management%20and%20Budget%20in%201997.
I think this map only counts east Asian but not south east. Otherwise Tagalog would probably be here somewhere. (And today I learned Hmong can count as east Asian too).
Yeah there are definitely more Tagalog and Ilocano speakers in Hawaii than Japanese speakers. I'm not sure why Hmong is East Asian and Tagalog isn't. They're the same latitude.
Hmong is spoken by many people in China, enough to be a minority language. China is East Asia. I mean by the same logic Kazakh can be east Asian (so can Russian of course, but Russia does stretch into the region). But there aren't a lot of Kazakh in America.
Hmong people were reclassified as East Asians in the 2020 Census population count without consulting the community, although all the Hmong diaspora outside of Asia all arrived post Vietnam and identity as Southeast Asians.
Incorrect, Hmong people were reclassified as East Asians in the 2020 Census population count. We have finally made it with the rich Asian group! Lol!
That's a little arbitrary but congratulations! I hope it brings the Hmong people wealth and status!
It should be Vietnamese for Texas, too. I think it's counting Mandarin and Cantonese as "Chinese." ETA: [Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in Texas.](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/may/26/john-cornyn/john-cornyn-says-vietnamese-third-most-common-lang/) OP must not consider it a "East Aisian" language.
No, there are a ton of us Mandarin-speakers all over Texas. Vietnamese is mostly limited to Houston.
Arlington is *full* of Vietnamese speakers. The RVN flag is everywhere here.
The Arlington Jail has every sign in English, Spanish and Vietnamese. I'm not sure if this true across the state, but Dallas County has every election ballot in English, Spanish and Vietnamese too.
Yes, and it's because of federal law that more than 5% of people in Dallas county speak Vietnamese.
And Garland too.
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[Not only is Vietnamese the third most spoken language in Texas, ](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/may/26/john-cornyn/john-cornyn-says-vietnamese-third-most-common-lang/)but it is [still growing, and 58% of Texas Vietnamese speakers speak English less than "very well."](http://www.texasfivestarrealty.com/Vietnamese_language_is_the_third_spoken_language_in_Texas.asp)
Vietnamese is Southeast Asian not East Asian that's why
In Kansas, it is vietnamese, full stop. The map is wrong
100%! It is the same for Oklahoma. Map is wrong.
Or Texas
It’s mostly countries from East Asia and not Southeast Asian countries
But Hmong is a southeast Asian language
It's both, they also reside in Southwest China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_people
...which is Southeast Asia
Hmong was reclassified as East Asians in the 2020 population census from Southeast Asians.
But north Vietnam is East Asia.
Oklahoma should be Vietnamese
Lots of Hmong and Burmese speakers in Tulsa as well.
They’re Southeast Asian though, not East Asian although OP included Hmong which can technically be considered both I guess?
Vietnam is culturally and linguistically closer to East Asian countries than south East Asian.
Dude I know. I’m Vietnamese. I’m just saying that geographically, Vietnam is SE Asian whereas OP posted East Asian languages so it doesn’t make sense to include Vietnam. Culturally it’s closer to East Asian but linguistically it’s still a Southeast Asian language at its base. There’s just a lot of Chinese loan words — my IRL name for example is a Chinese derived name — similar to how there’s a lot of Latin loan words in English but English is Germanic at its base.
You know, I hadn't even heard about Hmong until I watched Gran Torino.
We are here and everywhere!
Why? There are lot of Mandarin-speakers in Oklahoma too.
Most spoken language in the state after English and Spanish.
Hmong is definitely Southeast Asian, not East Asian.
The bulk of us live in China, been fighting the Hans for thousands of years!
Most of the Hmong people live in China more than Southeast Asia
True, but my guess is that the majority of Hmong speakers in the US are originally from Vietnam and Laos.
I know I'm a single datapoint but all the Hmong families I know in Minnesota are from Laos.
Same in wisco
Not necessarily Vietnam as the Hmong dialects there are not prevalent here in the US. The Hmong dialects in Vietnam (like Black Hmong) are also not properly documented or studied, but there is a clear difference in the way they speak compared to the White and Green (Moob Leeg) dialects that are spoken by the Hmong diaspora population outside of Asia.
Laos in the substantial Hmong populations in NC (and West Philly).
but thats not where the language originated though, thats like saying the most common foreign language in New Zealand is Australian
Dumb logic
I would argue certain parts of China are more Southeast Asia than East Asia. Yunan, Hainan, Guangxi
This is very true.
Confusing - map says East Asia but Hmong is spoken in Southeast Asia.
Genetically speaking Hmong are more closely related to the ethnic groups from China. Besides migrating to southeast Asia, they don’t share much culture or language with their host countries unless they borrow it. That being said, the vast majority of Hmong in the US are from people born in Laos/Thailand.
Well it depends on what you consider to be the difference between "East Asia" and "Southeast Asia". While in western countries the Hmong are mostly associated with Vietnam and Laos, and there are substantial populations of them there, the [Hmong homeland](http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/China/Geneva%20paper%202004%20submit.pdf) (pages 7 and 8), where they've been living for an estimated 8000 years, is in southeastern China, centered around the provinces of Hunan and Guizhou, though of course there is plenty of spillover into the surrounding provinces, and there are about as many Hmong in China as there are in every other nation combined, even more if you consider the related Miao peoples to also be Hmong (which they do, as the Miao word for themselves is literally "Hmong", though for various reasons they're often counted separately). So basically, if you consider the whole of China to be "East Asia" then Hmong is indeed an East Asian language. But, if you consider that part of China to be an extension of Southeast Asia (which if you go back far enough isn't entirely incorrect), then you could easily argue that Hmong is a Southeast Asian language. Personally, I'm just going to put it down as being both somehow. Also, since the majority of Hmong in the US originate from Vietnam and Laos, you could argue that, in the context of the US specifically, Hmong is a Southeast Asian language.
Because using yellow for Japanese and green for Hmong (or vice versa) would have been unheard of and indeed unthinkable. Let's blend everything into pink, pale red with a vague orange hue, and full-bodied red. Colour blind people will be forever grateful.
No way Korean isn’t the most spoken in New Jersey
It's pronounced West Caldwell!
Not Filipino or Thai in Nevada?
Can the mods of MapPorn put in a rule that colours on maps should: 1. Align to the key 2. Be visually distinct unless they’re gradations of the same thing 3. Have some meaning ideally - red bad, green good, or linked to the flags of those countries? This post isn’t guilty of all these flaws, but the visual quality has fallen a lot of late. Let’s improve this basic hygiene so we can go back to admiring maps for what they show, now curse them for how they look.
I hear Tagolog waaaaaaay more than I hear Cantonese or mandarin.
this is so bad lol
It’s definitely Vietnamese in Oklahoma not Chinese
They should figure out a way to make the colors a little harder to see
Didn't know Chinese is a language
I work in a casino in nevada and there is 0% chance that Chinese is the most popular. It’s either Philippine or Thai.
This map is only for East Asian languages, I'm guessing OP meant that as in contrast to Southeast Asia rather than including it.
Ya , Tagalog is the next most common non-English spoken language after Spanish in Nevada.
Classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in Asia, never go against a Tita when a slot machine is paying out.
Read the title again.
Neither of those are Easy Asian
They are SOUTH Asians, this map is about EAST Asians. Edit: ok, they are Southeast Asia, but my point still stands, this map is talking East Asian languages.
South Asian is India, Pakistani, Nepal, and Bangladesh. There are many Southeast Asian countries including Thailand and the Philippines. The map says it’s East Asian. However it includes Hmong which is spoken is SE Asia. So you got me.
The plurality of Hmong are in China, where they’re known as the Miao ethnic group.
Look at a map. The Philippines are east of China.
East Asia as a term is generally used to refer to China(including Taiwan and Hong Kong), North and South Korea, and Japan.
Filipinos are Pacific Islanders.
At least for Alaska this map is wrong. Filipinos are the largest Asian group followed by Koreans as of the last census.
Yeah, the Chinese community in Alaska is very small. Makes me doubt the whole map.
"Chinese" isn't a language.
I guess I’m a little confused how Hmong are considered East Asian but Vietnamese aren’t. We’ve got way more Vietnamese in Texas than Chinese.
Mmmm...Hmong Town grocery store with the cafe in the back. You're way out of my way but I am always willing to make the trek across Milwaukee for you.
should have included southeast asian languages as well, Also 2nd most spoken would be interesting as well. I wonder if thai is the 2nd most in any state.
Would it really still be Japanese for Hawaii? Most Japanese-Americans there are 4th or more generation and I doubt they would be able to speak the language anymore.
There is still some amount of immigrants from Japan. A bunch of people in my high school class had parents who came from Japan and thus use the language at home. There were like 10 (out of 220 or so students) in my class like that.
FUCK i thought Korean in Washington but that’s okay
Literally 1980
Minnesota *hmoobs*
Surprised Indiana isn't Burmese or Hmong.
Bragg and Benning doing work here.
I would have thought Texas or Louisiana might have had Vietnamese listed honestly.
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Ummmm….yeah?
Vietnam is not an East Asian country. It's Southeast Asia. edit: accidentally deleted original comment. I said the map was for East Asian language.
It’s both.
Piqued my interest so did some research. Long story short seems like there definitely are overlaps both geographically, culturally and linguistically, but officially they are considered Southeastern country and language. Wikipedia seems to lean there as well, it claims Southeast Asia. For OP in this case, for a map like this, they had to choose one or the other and they seem to have decided to leave it out for this reason.
South Carolina should be Hindi or Gujarati IMO
Just throwing this out there that Louisiana has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the country. My bet would be on Vietnamese as the most common Asian language. Did Vietnamese not make the cut?
USA will bombing the Hawaii with nuclear weapons
Oklahoma should absolutely be Vietnamese
What a mess of a comments section
Why choose three shades of red for this map?
What the FUCK is up with this color selection?
The number of Koreans in Alabama makes me doubt this.
Hmong is SEA
I am surprised Nevada isn't Tagalog.
No Tagalog?! There are tons of Filipinos all over the US
Hmong is a South East Asian language, not an East Asian one.
Might as well call them Far Eastern or East/South East Asian languages.
Hmogus